Luis de Morales

Morales earliest dated work is the Virgin with the Little Bird (Madrid, Private Collection). It is dated 1546 and was painted for the parish church of La Conception in his hometown, Badajoz. Morales was invited by Philip II to paint at the Escorial but “since his ability was not suited to other things, nor to works on a large scale” (Palomino, op. cit.), he returned to Badajoz where he remained for the rest of his life. His most important patron there was the Bishop Juan de Ribera, of whom he painted a rare portrait (Museo del Prado, Madrid). Morales would have been aware of the writings of contemporary Spanish mystics such as St Peter of Alcántara and Juan de Ávila whose call to spiritual meditation is echoed by Morales’ preferred iconography, for which there was such a huge demand. In the 1560s Morales was also busy with larger commissions such as the high altar of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción in Arroya de la Luz, Cáceres and for the Dominican church of San Domingo in Evora, Portugal. These, however, betray his uncertain mastery of perspective and inability to organize multi-figural compositions.

Despite Morales’s conservative piety, he was aware of contemporary humanist currents as the Holy Family in the New York Hispanic Society makes clear. Its iconography refers not only to Erasmus’s commentary on the Gospel of Saint Luke but, in the diagram of the horoscope of Christ which he includes, the De astorum iudiciis, an edition of a work by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, published in Basel in 1554. Even if they had major stylistic differences, Morales’s nearest artistic equivalent is El Greco (1541–1614) who replicated images of similar spiritual intensity.